Wednesday, June 20, 2012

These are the last days to see Jasper Joffe's "Power & Beauty" at Kenny Schachter/ Rove Gallery 33/34 Hoxton Square, London. Open 10am to 6pm every day until this Saturday June 23th.

Jasper's large oil canvases career around the celebrity sphere and then detour to a grim bunch of dictators in living color. You can also see the complete images from the exhibition here: http://www.rovetv.net/powerandbeauty.html

Jasper advises: "You could go on Saturday and see some other shows too at Ibid Projects, White Cube, and perhaps wander up to Victoria Miro. Why not get a Vietnamese Baguette, I recommend the classic at Keu on Old Street. But it will make me happy if you see my show."

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Artist Gary Baseman writes from The Ukraine, his ancestral home: "Toby
& I loved the Color Explosion when we entered this little Ukrainian
Market in Kostopol, which used to be the hometown of my mother." (Toby is the artist's creation and in the arms of the shopkeeper in this photo).

"Second Nature" suggests those things that have become so habitual to us
that they seem innate. Habits of thought, action, or sensibility become
so ingrained that we no longer notice that they are not in fact natural
but instead conditioned and developed. Theodore Adorno famously
developed this concept in his writing about the culture industry,
describing it as the pre-constructed social and material space into
which the individual must fit and conform. Contemporary residents of the
West grow up in a world of IKEA furniture, concrete, television, cars
and the 40-hour work week, and inevitably take such things as totally
natural. Perhaps more importantly, built into this cultural environment
are ideological constructions like race, gender, class and sexual
identity -- this is the reason why the seemingly innocuous culture
industry is so crucial to investigate. Adorno's key point was not simply
that we have become alienated from the natural world of rocks, trees,
animals and lightning storms inhabited by our ancient ancestors, but
that this world has largely been replaced by a second, constructed world
that we cannot help but accept as "natural".

One consequence of this replacement is that our perception of the
original natural world is forever to be viewed through the lens of
second nature. Boundaries between the natural and cultural are no longer
coherent. Yet the artists in this exhibition take this convoluted
borderland as a generative space. The show brings together work in
photography, drawing, collage, sculpture and mixed media, and presents a
variety of aesthetic approaches. From quiet images of natural spaces
interacting with human artifacts, to careful compositions that express
deeply human issues by using imagery from the natural world, to complex,
fragmentary collages portraying the ubiquity of second nature itself,
these artists collectively explore the complexity of issues that exists
at the intersection of these two worlds.

Thursday, June 7, 2012

"My work focuses primarily on investigating perception," says Natasha Lythgoe, the British photographer who will open her first exhibition in Paris on Wednesday 13 June, 2012 at the Centre Iris, 238 Rue St Martin 75003.

Current projects focus around the question of whether it is possible to retain a sense of subject matter in abstract/non-representational photography. "I continue to explore ways in which disparate images from different places, time and apparent subject matter can be bought together to create a coherent whole."